Ryoukoukyou Seikun
by inwardtransience
Summary: Sei Kokumei honestly never expected to amount to much. Hers was to be a life of invisible poverty, she knew. Would probably die an unnoticed death, deep in the fringes of Kyou. But sometimes, circumstance and chance can redirect a person's life in ways no one could ever predict. (A kinda-sorta-not-really prequel to Taiho.)


_Hey. I just posted a chapter of_ Taiho _I realized I finished forever ago, and...I figured I may as well post the first chapter of this. Why not?_

 _This was originally part of some planning I was doing_ _for_ Taiho _—I was going to stick it in as a sort of flashback thing some time after where the story is right now. I don't always necessarily through-write everything. I quickly came up with far too many ideas, and decided it would better operate as a story of its own. So here it is. It won't be necessary to have actually read_ Taiho _to get what's going on here. Enjoy and stuff._

 _~Wings_

* * *

"Yuurei!" The voice that called his name was bright, cheerful, and surprised into amazement.

A smile on his face, Yuurei walked up to his sister, working in the garden around her home. At least she had been—when he had appeared she had dropped whatever that tool was, jumped to her feet. The familiar contrast of bright bronze skin and deep blue hair. Though she looked significantly older than he remembered. Considering they hadn't met in nearly ten years, that wasn't surprising. "If it isn't my beautiful little sister. I'm surprised you even remember the name of such a useless brother like me."

In response, he just got a running hug from her. He held her, laughing into her hair a little.

His sister had never really done very well in school, but Yuurei had gone all the way to the district academy. He never actually graduated—a provincial general passing through instantly took a shining to him, and Yuurei had ended up serving him. By now, some fifteen years later, he was one of General Kun's most trusted retainers, edging out people who had been with the General much longer than had he.

The Kingdom had actually been on some rather shaky ground of late. Rumor had it that their King was starting to drift from the Way. General Kun could see things starting to fall apart, but could do little else but try to keep his own province together the best he could. That was part of why he had distanced himself from some of his old retainers—he felt they had started to become corrupted by the wealth surrounding them, started to lose track of their true priorities. Their true loyalties. So Yuurei had ended up stepping in.

But of course, following the General around necessarily meant he saw much less of his sister. He had managed to drop in a few times near the beginning, but as the General grew to depend on him more, getting away had become impossible. He did keep track of her though, what little he could. Checking the census every once in a while, he noticed that her husband, who she had had two children with, had died a few years ago. The elder of those children was old enough to have gotten a partition, was off in the world somewhere. The younger was seventeen or eighteen, as far as he could tell attending school somewhere. So his sister was living alone.

Which is why, when she pulled him inside, insisting he sit and have tea with her and catch up, he was surprised by what he found. It was a perfectly ordinary home in a perfectly ordinary farming village, nothing surprising. But what did surprise him were the papers on the simple table. An ink and brush set surrounded by papers, covered in lines of characters. Every column was the same character over and over, those represented among the first anyone learned, the handwriting the hesitating, hypercorrect strokes of a child. He immediately came up with an explanation. "Are you teaching yourself to write?" He knew she didn't know much.

Working on getting tea going, his sister's hands froze for a few seconds. "No, those are Mei's. I'm sorry, she never cleans up after herself."

"Mei?"

"My youngest. She's seven."

Yuurei was going to point out this Mei wasn't on the census, and ask what exactly that was about, but bit his tongue. He wasn't sure if his sister would appreciate that he had essentially been spying on her. Maybe the records he had seen were out of date, or he had just missed it. Either was possible.

They were talking, waiting for the water to boil, when something singularly odd happened. Glancing around the house, as he usually did whenever in conversation with someone, he saw something walk in the door—something definitely not human. He was already standing, reaching for his sword, before he consciously put together what it was. It was a four-legged, spotted animal, a cat. Too large to be one of the strays occasionally seen walking around, much too small to be a youma. A leopard. Which was a little odd—leopards weren't usually something seen this part of the world. They were too far north. The leopard froze partway inside, looking at him with strangely intelligent, deep green eyes.

"No, Yuurei," his sister said, gesturing him to put his sword away. Then she turned and, amazingly, spoke to the leopard. "Mei, we have a guest. Go change and put some clothes on." The leopard considered Yuurei for a second, then turned and vanished into the other room. Yuurei put it together instantly. That would explain why he hadn't seen her on the census.

His niece was a hanjuu.

* * *

A couple hours later, Mei was down for a nap. For that the girl had actually shed her clothes—right in front of Yuurei, as though he weren't even there—and turned back into a leopard. To Yuurei's baffled expression, his sister had whispered that the girl always slept in the animal form she had come out of the ranka in if she could help it. Whenever his sister had asked her about it, she always just said she was more comfortable that way.

They were sitting out in the garden now, talking. Naturally, Yuurei steered the conversation toward the niece he hadn't known he'd had. His sister resisted the topic for a long time, clearly reluctant, but eventually caved.

Sighing, she said, "We just decided we wanted another child one day." By _we_ she must mean herself and her late husband. "We were blessed to have the two we had, of course, but we felt we had room in our lives and our hearts for a third. When we resolved to try, it was the beginning of the month. We waited out the first few days." Livestock grew on the riboku as well as children. The first six days prayers were allowed for various sorts of animals, the seventh day reserved solely for children. The eighth, no prayers were made to the riboku at all. The rest of the month were all days reserved for children. "The seventh day came. We picked a branch, tied on the ribbon, said our prayers, as you do. We came back the next day to pray." That was usual practice as well. It usually took three days to a week for the ranka to appear, so people showed up each day to repeat their prayers if they could. While the ranka grew too, they dropped by as much as they could. "And the ranka was already there."

Yuurei blinked at her. "Really."

"Just a bud, as it always starts. But it was there. Have you ever heard of that happening?"

"No. Maybe seveners just do that?" Seveners, children who had first been prayed for on the seventh day of the month, were considered lucky. He couldn't recall ever actually meeting one. Most parents avoided starting on the seventh for a variety of superstitious reasons. Worried they were asking for more than they deserved.

"I asked the attendant at the shrine, and she said as far as she knows, they don't. There have been a number of times a ranka showed the next day, but it isn't common. The attendant told me it's a sign that the child was important, had some sort of destiny. A prayer answered that quickly could only mean Tentei had already prepared the child to be created, and was just waiting for parents worthy of receiving it. She said."

"Interesting idea."

"Yeah. She was really surprised when Mei turned out to be a hanjuu."

"I can imagine." The Decrees handed down by Tentei at the Creation made a passing mention to hanjuu—neither praising nor condemning, simply listing them as a race of people. Many folk religions, though, considered hanjuu unclean, even bad omens. Some insisted an increase in hanjuu births foretold a decline in their home kingdom, though there was no evidence for that. Hanjuu populations fluctuated across time and space, but exactly what caused those changes wasn't clear—there were no real observable patterns. Hanjuu were just as numerous in stable, wealthy kingdoms as ruinous ones. Since wealthy kingdoms usually put less barriers in their path, listing them on the census and everything, they were even more visible. Which he guessed made them easy scapegoats.

"My husband got sick and died not long after that. So it was just me and the kids. And Mei is—" She let out a long sigh. Then sent Yuurei a somewhat guilty look. "I don't mean to, um…"

Yuurei just smiled at her. "It's okay, Sis. It's me. Feel free to say whatever."

She sighed again. "Hanjuu can be a bit difficult to deal with. You know they're born in their animal shape?"

"Yeah," he said with a shrug. Everyone knew that.

"Well, you know they don't learn to become human for four or five years?"

For a long moment, he just stared at her. "Uh, no, I hadn't heard that."

"I'm told it's something that happens with all hanjuu. Kirin even do the same thing, apparently. And they learn to understand speech at the same rate normal kids do, but they can't talk." He raised an eyebrow at that, and she clarified. "Hanjuu can talk in animal form, of course, but before they first learn to become human they can't say a word. And they don't talk the same way either. Watch her mouth when she's a leopard and it doesn't move at all. I asked her about it once, and she said she just kinda thinks the words at people. It's so intuitive for them it took her a few tries to come up with even that explanation. For some reason, it sounds so much like normal speech, and _exactly_ like her voice, you can't even tell the difference. And sometimes people can't understand her at all the first time they meet her. She doesn't even know why.

"But anyway, I thought I was going _insane_. Taking home this cat, treating it like my daughter, like any kid. You couldn't really tell just by looking at her she was a hanjuu, just looked like a cat. There were times where I couldn't convince myself that this was really a person, my God-given daughter, and I was just losing my mind. But one day, I came home, and there was this naked girl I had never seen before in my house. Ran up and hugged me, calling me Mom like it wasn't anything special. Never cried so hard in my life."

"Seems like a weird reaction." Though sort of understandable, he guessed.

His sister scratched the side of her head, staring up at the sky. "I don't know why, really. I think I was happy, but I really couldn't say. But it wasn't long after that things started getting weird again."

"Weird how?"

Again, she hesitated a long moment. "People say hanjuu are half-human, half-animal. But as far as I can tell, that isn't true. It's more like she's completely human, but also completely animal. She has all the intelligence and emotional depth of any person her age. She's actually pretty bright for her age, more clever than her brother and sister were. But at the same time, she has all the instincts of a leopard." She took a long breath, but didn't clarify.

But Yuurei understood anyway. "She wanted to hunt."

Looking uncomfortable, she nodded. "Leopards are predators. It's what they do. And that is definitely part of her, a big part of her. Before she could turn into a person, I was keeping her locked up in the house. I was so terrified someone would mistake her for just an ordinary animal and kill her. Or some bigger creature would get her. There's a pack of dogs running around here, and bears in the mountains. Or she could, I don't know, get lost or something. But when she started talking, one of the very first things she ever asked me for was to be let out. She kept begging. So, I just told her to respect other people's property, to not mess with anything that belongs to one of our neighbors, and let her out."

Before going on, she took another deep breath in and out. She gave him a sheepish smile. "People actually like having her around. A few times, they've gone so far as, if they think they have an uninvited guest living in their house, inviting her in to flush it out. We've got to be the only village in the Kingdom with no rats." Though her smile was still on her face, her voice had turned slightly hysterical.

"Sis…" He noticed his voice had turned slightly worried.

"No, it's—" She sighed. "Sometimes, she'd take down something big enough she couldn't—" She took a breath. "—eat all of it at once, so she'd carry the rest back home. Well, I can't have her bringing half-eaten animals into the house, you know. She doesn't do it anymore. Either she only catches small stuff, or she just hides them somewhere else." She glanced at him, taking in his expression for a few seconds. He probably looked concerned. "It's just _weird_ is all. I've heard that people often have trouble getting along with predator hanjuu, and I completely understand why. They're _different_. She doesn't think, talk, or act at all like a normal child. I mean, sometimes, you could spend a few hours with her and not even notice anything weird at all. But then she'll say or do something, and you'll remember. She's not a normal person.

"That's not exactly a _bad_ thing. And by now I'm mostly used to it. But it is weird." She sighed again. "And sometimes I worry."

"About?"

"Well, hanjuu in Kyou aren't on the census. She won't get a partition when she comes of age. People don't exactly line up to hire hanjuu. When I'm not around to look after her anymore, I'm worried she'll end up no better than the meanest itinerant. If anything happens to me..." She broke off, shaking her head to herself.

There was certainly a risk of that happening. Hanjuu usually didn't do so well in Kyou. "Maybe I can do something about that." She gave him a look, and he smiled. "I think a letter of introduction signed by General Kun himself should go a long way toward easing people's minds. Should be enough to at least get her a job somewhere, anyway."

Her eyes wide, she said, "You would do that for me?"

"Sure. I know I haven't been around much," he said, a little guiltily, "and I don't see that changing anytime soon. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to help if I can."

His sister looked so relieved, so grateful, he thought she might cry.

* * *

"That a real sword?"

Yuurei had offered to take his sister and his niece out to eat in the city just down the road. With how late it already was, they would probably spend the night at an inn there too, as the gates would likely close before they finished eating. His sister, a little exhausted from working all morning, suggested the two of them go alone. Yuurei guessed she wouldn't mind a night to herself anyway. So he had set off together with his niece, who he hadn't even known existed before today.

Mei, in her human shape, was a somewhat scrawny girl, her long, wavy hair striped the same approximate brown and blonde as her fur when a leopard. Yuurei hadn't seen very many children recently, but he figured she was smaller than the average child her age. Though she was almost unnaturally light on her feet, and moved with a grace that clashed with her appearance in a way that was very subtly unnerving. Otherwise, she seemed like a pretty normal girl, but he didn't know much about kids, so he could be totally wrong.

She was looking at the sword at his waist. It was a pretty nice sword, actually, a touki the General had given him. Very simple in design, but very tough and eternally sharp. "Yeah, it is." Still walking, he grabbed the hilt and pulled up a few centimeters, revealing the smooth metal of the blade.

"Can I see it?"

A smile twitched at his face as he stopped. "Sure." He sank to one knee in front of her, removed the blade from its sheath entirely. He held it level in front of her, one hand supporting the hilt and the other under the flat of the blade, near the tip.

The little girl stared at the weapon, her expression looking more curious than anything. She lifted a hand, ran a finger along the flat of the polished metal. "It's funny."

"What is?"

"Other people don't have claws. So they make them instead."

Yuurei smiled at her. "I hadn't thought of it like that."

For a long moment, she kept staring. After a while, she said, "It's pretty."

"Yeah, well. Not as pretty as you."

She looked up at him, frowning a little.

"I am referring to your other shape," he said, just to clarify. "You're beautiful."

She kept frowning at him, her frown deeper now.

"What?"

"People look at me like I'm wrong." Interesting word choice.

" _Wrong_? How can you possibly be _wrong_? You came out of the ranka like that, right? Well, exactly who put you in there?"

Looking at him a little suspiciously, she said, "Tentei."

"Exactly," he said with a big smile. "All of us were created by Tentei exactly as He intended. If you were made the way you are, it's because this is _exactly_ what the Lord God Creator _wants_ you to be." Something those people with negative superstitions about hanjuu always seem to forget. "What could possibly be _wrong_ about that?"

Mei, after taking a second to consider that, returned his smile, her eyes almost sparkling back at him. Then her gaze switched back to the sword. "Can I hold it?" His lips twitched again at the casual phrasing of the question—he never spent time around children, and an adult would definitely phrase that question more humbly. After a second of thought—it was unlikely she would be able to actually hurt herself with the thing, how small she was—he nodded. Mei slipped one hand next to his at the hilt, another by his under the blade, so Yuurei dropped his hands. Mei's tiny shoulders slumped a little at the unexpected weight. "Wow. Heavy."

"That's just because you're small. It's actually pretty light for a sword its size."

She just hummed at that. Then she turned a few degrees away from him, moved her hand on the blade to the hilt, and raised the point. He blinked in surprise. If she were right handed, she was gripping the hilt exactly as she should—right hand as near the blade as she could get it, the left counterbalancing closer to the opposite end. Together with the angle she was holding the blade at, she had taken the first ready position most students are taught. She had even slipped her feet into the proper stance. The tip was wavering back and forth in the air a little, but the weapon was much too large for her, so that wasn't surprising. "There," she muttered to herself.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Some boys in the town spar with bamboo ones in winter. I watch."

For a moment he just stared at her—green eyes focused on the tip of the sword, obviously trying to get it to hold still. "Are you interested in swordplay?"

"Yeah."

"Any particular reason why?"

"Claws and teeth are—" She glanced up at the sky, as though searching for words. "Fighting like that is hot, and rough. Swords are cold and smooth. Beautiful." She stared at the blade for another second, then shifted around, holding the sword out to him to take back.

He returned his weapon to his waist, and they continued down the road. After walking a short while, he said, "I wouldn't think you would get in that many fights. Hunting doesn't really count."

"That pack people are always talking about bothers me sometimes. And a cat once."

"Pack? You mean wild dogs?" She just looked up at him and nodded. "Your mother's really worried about you running into them. How many are there?"

Mei just stared up at the sky for a long while, probably counting in her head. "Almost twenty, I think. But it was the same five or six always bothering me."

"And you can fight five or six of them at once?"

"Probably not if they meant it. I used to be smaller than them, but I'm bigger now." He would guess Mei was actually larger as a leopard than a girl. But that wasn't surprising—he was pretty sure real leopards got bigger than people. "But not as big as six. But they never tried to fight for real. Just bothered me. Once I got really annoyed and killed one of them. They mostly stay away now."

"How'd you manage to kill one?" He would think with their superiority of numbers, she wouldn't be able to devote enough time to one to actually pick it off.

"Animals are stupid. Do something new and they can't think fast enough to beat you. When they figure out you're smarter than them, they get scared and run away." Actually, that's often true of people as well. "Whenever they bother me, they just run in and nip at me, then run away. Again and again. I let them keep doing that, scratching back the same way every time. Then when one came at me—" She clapped her hands in front of her. Not loud, but suddenly enough, especially against the softness of her voice, he almost jumped. "—jumped on top of him and killed him in a second. The others got scared and ran away. The same ones don't bother me anymore."

"The same ones?"

"Some of the others in the pack will sometimes. I think just to get a look at me. Mostly follow me around, never get close."

After a second of thought, he realized what that sort of wariness implied. "They can talk to each other?" They would have had to have learned she was someone to be cautious of somehow.

Mei didn't speak for a few seconds. "Sort of? Not like people do." Yuurei stared at her, wondering if he should ask for a more detailed explanation. She glanced up at him, let out a little sigh, then shrugged. "It's not like words. It's not like they say _There's a scary cat around that village. Don't go there._ Not with words. But they understand each other."

For a while, Yuurei thought about that. He wanted to ask if she understood them, but he wasn't sure if that was an appropriate question to ask. It could give the impression that he saw Mei as something less than human. She was still young, at an age where being surrounded by that sort of implication could deeply affect her. Already, she was probably in such an environment, but he didn't want to contribute to it if he could help it. A topic of more human interest than. "So, you'd like to be a soldier one day?"

Instead of answering directly, she said, "I don't wanna be a farmer."

He had to smile at that. "Those aren't the only options, you know."

Mei kicked a small stone on the road, sending it skittering ahead of them. "Are for me."

"What?"

She glanced up at him. "I'm a hanjuu," she said, as though that made it obvious.

"And?"

"I can't go to school." She kicked the same rock again. It went further this time, bouncing ahead of them across the road, nearly disappearing under a wagon they'd been trailing for most of their walk.

"Oh." She was right—people not listed on the census couldn't attend school. Even the meanest education available free of charge to all citizens of Kyou in their towns during winter wasn't open to her. He'd completely forgotten about that. That certainly did restrict her options. "Right. I forgot. But your writing stuff..."

"I said I wanted to learn. Mom found a friend to teach me. She likes it when I do normal kid stuff."

"Yeah, I guess she would."

"Mom hopes I can become a, uh…"

"Sharecropper." He was pretty sure that was the word she was looking for.

"Right. Farm some lazy rich guy's land for him. Since I can't have my own. But I don't wanna. Farming's boring."

A little hesitantly, he said, "You know, you can't legally join the army, either."

She glanced up at him. "I know that. But I think if there are lazy rich people who pay people to farm for them, I can find a lazy rich person who would pay me to be their—" She kicked the rock again. "Forgot the word."

"Mercenary? Bodyguard?"

"Yeah, those."

The public armies of the Kingdoms usually didn't discriminate based on gender—soldiers usually ended up being about a quarter to a third women, depending on location and time period. Though women soldiers were usually weaker when it came to physical strength, they tended to be quicker, which any swordsman could tell you can easily beat out power, and were rumored to function better than men under great pressure—either psychological pressure or the weight of accumulated injuries—though there was no proof of that one way or the other. Those recruiting private mercenaries, though, usually did discriminate. In his experience, female mercenaries were so rare as to be remarkable. If his impression of her being a small child were correct, and she remained small into adulthood, her chances would be even worse. That she was a hanjuu might actually help her get hired, paradoxically enough, but he would hate to see his niece be reduced to nothing more than someone's attack animal. "Why do you want to be a soldier anyway?" he decided to ask. "It's not the same as hunting, you know. It's not about killing."

She glanced up at him, looking a little annoyed. "I know that." They were starting to get pretty close to the city. Every once in a while, Mei would hop into the air a little bit to get a better look at it. She had never been to the city before. "Uh, one of our neighbor ladies has a bunch of chickens."

Okay. "Yeah?"

"She told me one day how sometimes one of her chickens disappeared. No matter what she did. She thought the dogs might be stealing them. She said recently she hadn't lost a chicken in a while, if I knew anything about that. I said I got in a fight with the dogs, and they're scared of me now, so they don't come close to the village anymore."

Oh. Now this tangent made sense. "She was grateful, I take it."

She nodded. "I asked her not to tell Mom." Probably worried she would get in trouble. "She gives us eggs sometimes when she has extra now. Mom doesn't know why. And in the winter, the other two villages complain about the rats chewing on things. My village brags that we don't have rats anymore. I got rid of them all."

"It's always nice to be appreciated."

Mei shrugged. "Thieves and murderers are just like rats, aren't they?" Mei kicked the rock again. This time she didn't hit it at the right angle, so it went spinning off the side of the road. She watched it disappear, then said, "Youma, too. I hear they're worse, you can't scare them away like the dogs."

"No, you certainly can't."

"Have you seen one before?"

He nodded. "I went with the General on a trip to Han. The five of us got attacked by one, but we managed to kill it without losing anybody." One of them did get mauled pretty badly, but he recovered just fine. After a moment of thought, he said, "You know what my job is?"

"I never heard of you before today."

Okay, now he felt a little uncomfortable. "Yeah, sorry. Do you know what a province is?"

"Really, really big. Nine in each kingdom."

"Well, I'm a personal retainer of the General of the Right for our province. A really, really important guy. And what I've learned observing these really important guys, is they'll bend the rules, sometimes even break them, for someone they like."

Mei frowned up at him. "Yeah?"

"I mean, when you get old enough I might be able to talk General Kun into helping you out."

Mei smiled, a more powerful expression than any he'd seen from her yet. Powerful in the degree of happiness it communicated, of course. But for some reason, that he couldn't really put words to very well, he could hardly believe in that moment he was looking at a seven year old.

* * *

Yuurei: 斿戻

Kun: 勛

Mei: 盟

 _(No, I'm not going to give the kanji of the somewhat awkward title of the story, nor translate it. I will when it comes up in the story. Which...will be a while xD)_


End file.
